Reforming Pakistan’s Universties -- I

There is a severe and long-standing crisis in higher education. But, until the present military government took the initiative, there was no rehabilitation plan. Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, appointed as chairman of the Higher Education Commission, was the wonder-man charged by General Musharraf with turning the situation around. He was quick to make a powerful pitch for vast increases in funding.

Foreign donors, worried about the implications of Pakistan’s sinking educational system, obliged. The higher education budget zoomed by twelve times (1,200 per cent) over three years, a world record. A number of new and innovative utilization schemes were announced.

Some solid achievements did emerge. Internet connectivity in universities has been substantially expanded; distance education is being seriously pursued through the newly established Virtual University; a digital library is in operation; some foreign faculty has been hired; students are being sent abroad for PhD training (albeit largely to second rate institutions); some links with foreign institutions now exist; and money for scientific equipment is no longer a problem. No previous Pakistani government can boast of comparable accomplishments, and the HEC chairman deserves congratulations.

But the HEC is also setting into motion very dangerous, potentially catastrophic, systemic changes. In this article I will look at the problems in our higher education system and why the HEC reforms are set to make a bad situation worse rather than better. In a subsequent article, I will suggest some modest steps that may offer a way forward.

Pakistan has almost a hundred universities now. Not one of them is world class. Truth be told, not even one of them is a real university, if by a university one means a community of scholars engaged in free inquiry and the creation of knowledge.

Take for example the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, reputed to be Pakistan’s best. Academic activities common in good universities around the world are noticeably absent. Seminars and colloquia, where faculty present for peer review the results of their on-going research, are few and far between. Public lectures, debates, or discussions of contemporary scientific, cultural, or political issues are almost non-existent.

The teaching at QAU is no better. Rote learning is common, students are not encouraged to ask questions in class, and courses are rarely completed by the end of the semester. This university has three mosques but no bookstore. It is becoming more like a madressah in other ways too.

It was not always this way. The global intellectual ferment of the late
1960’s and 70’s had a stimulating impact on Pakistani campuses.
Intellectual, scientific, cultural and literary activity flourished. Young Pakistani scholars gave up potential careers in the West to come to Pakistani universities. But in November of 1981, just days after three QAU teachers had been caught with anti-martial law and pro-democracy pamphlets, General Ziaul Haq thundered on television that he would "purge the country’s universities of the cancer of politics". He succeeded.

A quarter century later, the faculty are more concerned with money and promotions than research, teaching, or bringing their knowledge to bear on the myriad issues facing our society. Among the students there are many burqas and beards, but minuscule intellectual or creative activity. All student unions are gone, and ideological disputes have evaporated into the thin air. Instead of left vs right politics there is simple tribalism. Now Punjabi students gang together against Pakhtoon students, Muhajirs versus Sindhis, Shias versus Sunnis, etc.

Some campuses are run by gangs of hoodlums and harbour known criminals, while others have Rangers with machine guns on continuous patrol. On occasion, student wolf packs attack each other with sticks, stones, pistols, and automatic weapons. There are many campus murders. Most students have not learned how to think; they cannot speak or write any language well, rarely read newspapers, and cannot formulate a coherent argument or manage any significant creative expression.

Dumbed down, this generation of Pakistanis is intellectually handicapped. Like overgrown children, students of my university now kill time by making colourful birthday posters for friends, do "istikhara" (fortune telling), and wander aimlessly in Islamabad’s bazaars.

Understanding the scale of the failure is important. Compare Pakistan’s premier university with those in its neighbours’ capitals. First to the east: Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Indian Institute of Technology, in Delhi.

Their facilities are simple and functional, nothing like the air-conditioned and carpeted offices of most professors at QAU. And, more important, every notice board is crammed with notices for seminars and colloquia, visitors from the very best foreign universities lecture there, research laboratories hum with activity, and pride and satisfaction are written all around.

Conflict on campuses does exist - communist and socialist students battle with Hindutva students over the Gujrat carnage, Iraq, Kashmir, and the BJP doctoring of history. Angry words are exchanged and polemics are issued against the other, but no heads are bashed. While lecturing at these institutions during a recent visit, I was impressed by the fearlessness and the informed, critical intelligence of the students who questioned and challenged me. I cannot imagine an Indian professor having a similar reception in Pakistan.

Now to the west: Teheran’s Sharif University of Technology, and the
Institute for Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, are impressive institutions filled with professional activity, workshops, and seminars.
Even as they maintain good academic standards, Iranian university students are heavily political and today are spearheading the movement for freedom and democracy. Iranian students make it to the best US graduate schools. Although it is an Islamic republic, bookshops are more common than mosques in Tehran. Translations into Farsi appear in just weeks or months after a book is published in the western world.

Driven by the unfavourable comparison with neighbours, the need for university reform finally became an issue. The first big idea was that
Pakistan needed more universities. So today all it takes is a piece of paper from the HEC and some paint. Some colleges have literally had their signboards taken down for repainting, and been put back up changed into "universities" the next day.

By such sleight of hand the current tally of public universities, according to the HEC website, is now officially 47, up from the 23 officially listed in 1996. In addition, there are eight degree awarding public sector institutes. Unfortunately, this is merely a numbers game. All new public sector universities lack infrastructure, libraries, laboratories, adequate faculty, or even a pool of students academically prepared to study at the university level.

The HEC’s "generosity" extends even into largely illiterate tribal areas. There are so-called universities now in Malakand, Bannu, Kohat, Khuzdar, Gujrat, Haripur, and in many other places where it is difficult to detect the slightest potential for successfully establishing modern universities.

Another poorly thought-out, and dangerous, HEC scheme involves giving massive cash awards to university teachers for publishing research papers - Rs 60,000 per paper published in a foreign journal. Although these stimulants are said to have increased the number of papers published in international journals by a whopping 44 per cent, there is little evidence that this increase in volume is the result of an increase in genuine research activity.

The fact is only a slim minority of Pakistani academics possesses the ethics, motivation, and capability needed for genuine scientific discovery and research. For the majority, the HEC incentives are a powerful reason to discover the art of publishing in research journals without doing research, to find loopholes, and to learn how to cover up one’s tracks.

Established practices of plagiarizing papers, multiple publications of slightly different versions of the same paper in different research journals, fabricating scientific data, and seeking out third-rate foreign journals with only token referees are now even more common. The HEC has broadcast the message: corruption pays.

The casual disregard for quality is most obvious in the HEC’s massive PhD production programme. This involves enrolling 1,000 students in Pakistani universities every year for PhD degrees. Thereby Pakistan’s "PhD deficit" (it produces less than 50 PhDs per annum at present) will supposedly be solved and it will soon be at par with India. In consequence, an army of largely incapable and ignorant students, armed with hefty HEC fellowships, has sallied forth to write PhD theses.

Although the HEC claims that it has checked the students through a "GRE type test" (the American graduate school admission test), a glance at the question papers reveals it to be only a shoddy literacy and numeric test. In my department, advertised as the best physics department in the country, the average PhD student now has trouble with high-school level physics and even with reading English. Nevertheless there are as many as 18 PhD students registered with one supervisor! In the QAU biology department, that number rises to 37 for one supervisor. HEC incentives have helped dilute PhD qualifying exams to the point where it is difficult for any student not to pass.

The implications of this mass-production of PhDs are dire. Very soon hundreds and, in time, thousands of worthless PhDs will be cranked out.
They will train even less competent students. Eventually they will become heads of departments and institutions. When appointed gatekeepers, they will regard more competent individuals as threats to be kept locked out. The degenerative spiral, long evident in any number of Pakistani institutions, will worsen rapidly, and become infinitely more difficult to break.